ChillingEffects.org, a shared project from a number of universities, came to my attention because of recent decisions by Twitter to censor people’s status updates depending upon the laws of certain countries. In China, your Google search is filtered stricter than even a school network, and that took years to come about. Twitter isn’t even allowed in China.

Twitter was influential in the Middle Eastern and Russian protests in recent years. It will be interesting to see how protesters will coordinate now. ChillingEffects will at least keep a record of government requests to censor online messages.

I’m working on designing the logo for this year’s chess team. Here’s what I have so far:
It’s nothing too mind-blowing, but I think it might make for a fun wallpaper (on your home computer). Click the thumbnail to view the full size.

Wikipedia followed through on the blackout, although you can get around it by turning off JavaScript in your browser. Google changed their logo. Twitter is tweeting about it. We’ll see if the statement was heard by lawmakers.

As a protest against SOPA and PIPA, Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, and a number of other big sites on the Internet are planning to stop services for 24 hours. Instead of a normal Google search, a page describing why they’re protesting.

The text of the Stop Online Piracy Act is here. The Protect IP Act is here. Essentially, the bills say that if a site is found to have material on it that breaks copyright, Internet service providers are required to deny access to those sites.

Are you ready to get some sunshine tomorrow? What are we going to do with ourselves? Use Bing?

This is a really quick tip that will save you a ton of time. When viewing a page as an administrator in pbworks, you can add a tag. If you type the word “template” all lower case as the tag, you can reuse the page as a template for when you create a new page.